BioShock Infinite’s religious content “highly altered” after consultation
By Tim Colwill on January 21, 2013 at 8:56 pm
BioShock Infinite‘s Ken Levine has explained that the game’s original religious themes have been “highly altered” based on feedback from his development team.
“I had some very valuable conversations. One of the characters in the game was highly altered based upon some very interesting conversations I had with people on the team who came from a very religious background, and I was able to understand they were kind of upset about something,” said Levine to OPM.
“What I said to them was, ‘I’m not going to change anything to get your approval, but I think I understand what you’re saying and I think I can do something that’s going to make the story better, based on what you said,’” he explained.
Despite this, Levine wants to assure viewers that the game isn’t centrally themed around religion. “I think people first saw it and thought it was a game about the tea party in America, then they saw it as a game about the labourer movement,” he said. “Now people are going to think it’s a game about religion.”
“It’s about patriotism, it’s about all those things but I think we keep larger meanings a little closer to our vest.”
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Congrats to (redacted) and also (redacted)!
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But could he/she/it ever live up to Elizabeth? If it was an enormous cyborg Songbird, then maybe.
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How about they stop making up bullshit and start deleting those “go here” arrows that ruined Bioshock.
Damn, now when I play this game I’m going to wonder what the original themes would have been. Phooey, and double phooey.
Fun fact: they have to pay royalties on those, or at least the people that own the copyright to that mechanic think they do.
Also, how can you suddenly stop ‘highly alter’/remove religious content from a character? Wouldn’t that have defined the character?
Something tells me the story won’t be the most coherent of things in infinite.
Couldn’t imagine anything worse, than to play a game about American patriotism… spend a day in EVE an you get a,ll the flag waving “we save the world bullshit” you can handle without wanting to kill somebody.Doesn’t surprise me the religious nutbags had the game changed, if I was gonna play this anyway I would be pissed that the fruit loops want to control what the rest of us play…
tas,
I like the way you automatically assume that the “religious nutbags” have resulted in the game or characters being “worse”. As I read this article I though “oh cool, maybe the character/s were unbelieveable or just stupid looking, so someone of faith has helped refine the character so they come across as genuine”. Terribly done “faith” in game characters is extremely stupid.
Man, I’ve played EVE for about 6 years. I’ve never come across the flag wavers.
I’d like to think you’re right, but it sounds a lot more like they had a gutsy critique of religion which offended some sensitive religious types, and has since been watered down.
There’s really not enough specifics to draw proper conclusions as to what might have changed, good or bad.
Maybe someone can get him to eleborate on it at a later stage (so as not to spoil the story).
Seems pretty clear to me. Surely if he’d had to cut content that he wanted in there, he wouldn’t even have brought it up in an interview.
Sounds to me like, as a non-religious person, he’d created a character who would not be believable to a religious person.